The first thing you need to know about anacondas is that their shite looks like mayonnaise. I can’t for the life of me figure out whether that renders them more sinister or more silly? The second thing you need to know about anacondas is that they don’t exist. Party over. Gather your jacket.
If you’d be so kind, remind me to search for Bolivian Road death statistics.* This driver from La Paz to Rurrenabaque was either born with seven fully intact, fully functioning bollocks or has recently overdosed on gumption because he’s overtaking lorries on blind corners with sheer drops just there next to us. This is the new Yungas Road in the darkest depths of night, and every time I rouse from a nap I see us mere inches from oblivion.
This blessed machine — in which sits the lives of 30ish people — also sounds remarkably akin to a WW2 sidecar, sputtering and juddering and spurting out thick dark smoke to match the night sky. One of the windows at the rear breaks on an elderly native.
* Internet search doesn’t yield much but in 2020 road deaths accounted for 3.23% of total fatalities in Bolivia, placing it 8th on the cause of deaths list, beating out some old favourites such as tuberculosis and leukaemia. Fun additional fact: this bus company had one of its vessels topple over the edge of this very route back in 2019, killing 25 people onboard. Rough.
Anyway, enough of this garble because we make it to Rurrenabaque — gateway to Bolivian Amazonia — with remarkable efficiency. And then it’s hot. It might be too hot. And that’s not me being a big British wimp, that’s me attempting to operate at 40+ degrees.
Rurrenabaque is a town flanking the Beni River. It’s got all the hallmarks of early tourism. It’s dry and dusty and oppressive and we churn through water like it’s going out of fashion. This is the kind of place you discover that your knees have sweat glands.
We opt for a five day, four night excursion encompassing both the pampas (vast, low grasslands surrounding an equally low brown river) and Madidi National Park (aka Selva, aka a glorious National Park in the upper Amazon river basin).
Enough Geography. We start with the pampas.
Allegedly a caiman bit a woman’s patella clean off here once which is banter.
Caiman are like alligators.
In the pampas there are both, in wildly varying sizes, as well as capybara (like giant hamster hippos), paradise birds, squirrel monkeys, and the slimey lithe bodies of pink dolphins, all visible from our narrow, roasting boat as we float down the murky river. It's dry season, and things have been very very dry indeed, so the river level is low and at times we have to rock and jiggle to free ourselves from silt. Juan Carlos, our guide, gets out now and again to push us. We coast and nature watch for three humid hours. It’s quite remarkable. At night, we use our flashlights to spot a sea of reflective eyes in the water.
Over the next few days we:
Watch a sunrise over the sweeping pampas
Go fishing — one of our fellow intrepids, Felix, catches a piranha, whilst Georgie gets a catfish. I get the odd leaf. When we run out of tiny chunks of meat Juan Carlos catches some sardines and chops them up and so we continue. I catch another leaf.
Sleep somehow fairly well in scorchio, bug-infested shacks
Nap in hammocks. Sweat drips down behind my ears
Entertain and appease two proper little Mowglis. The sons of the tour cook, they’re energetic, erratic and ever-fascinated
Watch from a balcony as the tips of forest fires burn in the middle distance
Float through ashy, smoky scenes as the same, spreading fires continue
Go hunting for anacondas. We all know how that ends up. No avail. Whilst we're shin deep in swamp, G asks me if there are alligators in there. Nah nah, can't be, it's too shallow and sludgy. Three minutes later Juan Carlos is kind enough to return from a breakaway conda-hunt to tell us the place is riddled with gators and you have to be careful not to step on their heads. That's been known to anger them. Really yeah?
Juan Carlos is a decent guide, and we learn plenty about the biodiversity and the fragility of the pampas in such grave heat, and the fact that the river getting much lower would prevent tourists from going there. More on this later. He lives in a community about a forty minute boat ride down the way, and tells us of how Covid pillaged professional and personal lives. It’s been hard graft getting things back to normal since. He also tells us:
‘Before I was a guide, I tried for a short time to sell ice cream…but it’s quite difficult you see…because it’s very hot’.
Fair play Juan Carlos.
Here are a bunch more snaps from a fascinating three days.
On the final morning in the pampas we ran out of water, which is rather poor form for a tour, but we got by, taking in drips of tepid fluid from previous bottles.
We then have an interim night at a place on the Beni river. The Beni is like three times removed from the Amazon river. It forms a confluence that forms a tributary. Them the facts. The place itself is large and extraordinary. It’s all owned by Miki, who I’ve somehow neglected to mention until now. Miki runs the tour company we opt for, and during his sales pitch he swung a machete around and told us numerous times ‘you want luxury, this not for you’ and even took his shirt off in some frenzied skit. To say he is a character is to do a great disservice to such incessant, infectious, almost disconcerting energy. Once again upon our arrival he acts like he’s just then smashed a packet of skittles with more than one of the skittles being solidified speed. Apologetic about the water situation, mind.
Anyway, this place he has developed in the semi-jungle is part hostel, part community, part haven. Check it out.
The next day we head for the Selva — vast, rugged rainforest lining the Beni. This is Amazonia as you’d picture it, I’d imagine. First we stop off at a local community on the river bank to knock coconuts from trees and enjoy their waters, drain juice from sugarcanes with wooden churn, and make chocolate from cocoa beans. This latter enterprise involves frying them off, peeling them, grinding them to a fine dust, and then mixing them with warm water. Rich and sensational, especially with those little bananas dipped in. All the while a couple of local chaps are going to work on a fresh ginormous carcass.
It’s a community celebration while we’re there, and a football match down the way attracts a large crowd. The winning team is due to win a cow. As we leave for the jungle, we see the cow obstinately refusing to climb the stretch to the presentation post. Good on you, cow.
Our guide for this stint is called Jesus (pronounced hey-zeus) because he was born on December 25th. Go figure. This is not where the similarities end, because he is a remarkable and miraculous man. Obviously being in and around the jungle for years n years lends one a set of competencies that we can only look on in awe, but Jesus was another level. I reckon if you put him and Bear Grylls in a similarly desolate situation he’d fashion a knife out of his pinkie, kill Bear with one swipe, and gorge on that succulent, SAS meat until the cows make it to the footie pitch.
Here is a slap-dash account of things we did in the jungle over these spectacular and challenging couple of days. Free be they from the absurd mechanisms of chronology!
We slept on the jungle floor, sheltered by layered leaves and a holey tarp to shun the downpour. We fished some more — I didn’t even catch a leaf, but Jesus, being who he is, brought plenty of sardines back to camp to crisp up over the fire. We learned about the Somolia tree — quite mad actually; Jesus banged his machete into its trunk and out came oozing liquid. Two drops, two minutes, ya gone. Most poisonous thing in the Amazon.
On a night walk, Georgie almost walked into a big toxic spider just lurking on its web. Fat and green and spiky and scary looking thing. Our torches were a biiiiig draw to all sorts of critters, and every few minutes came a yelp or shriek from someone in our small group as we crossed rivers and battled dense, lovely jungle. Some beasts just refuse to be shaken by our flailing limbs.
We made our own spoons out of bamboo and conducted a Pachamama ceremony, which consists of ‘asking permission’ from Mother Nature to be on the land and to be looked after. Jesus emphasised the importance of this form of ceremony to the people of the region, and it reflects similar things we heard on and around the Inca Trail back in Peru.
Shortly after this comes the tales of ‘small men of the Selva’ — myserious, ethereal beings that can’t be seen but can be felt; they meddle with those that either don’t believe in Pachamama or don’t respect the custody of the land.
On a separate note, this stretch of the trip consisted of genuinely delicious campfire scran of sauteed vegetables and diced local cheese off of large leaves. Darkness fell fast and we watched as green eyed luminescent buggos headed straight for the captivating fire. Had to bop them away to save their fragile lives. Utter heroics.
All in all, it was a matter of hiking, hurrying, scurrying and basking. Nature in absolute, dizzying abundance. We learned more than I can or care to recite. Nonetheless be sure you now know: certain ant stings can be used to prevent and address rheumatoid arthritis.
After we returned to Miki’s halfway house there was a strange and sombre mood; he told us that the group which started in the Selva (and crossed over with us to do the pampas after) had had a horrid time of it. The fires had spread and rendered the whole scene smokey and spooky; the river was so low that they had to push the boat a whole heap of the way, and their one night there was shrouded by an ominous orange haze and calamitous staffing. We caught up with some of these guys briefly on the night bus back to La Paz, and the overarching emotions were of concern, disappointment, and sadness.
This doesn’t nullify our experience, which was mostly fantastic, but it tells you something about a particular half of the ‘Amazonian’ offering in Rurrenabaque. i.e. — teetering on the edge of plausibility, yet another harsh marker of a churning, changing planet.
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